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Family Tree New York

Mary Bartos, the fourth-generation New Yorker who runs the Pan American Phoenix Shop at 857 Lexington Avenue.Credit
Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Most New Yorkers are comparative newcomers, and it’s easy to assume that nearly everyone who lives in the city started out somewhere else. Even a native-born New Yorker is a rare bird. But a relative handful of New Yorkers can claim bragging rights as fourth-, fifth- or even sixth-generation city dwellers whose families settled here many decades ago and have mostly stayed put, sinking ever deeper roots.

Members of this exclusive club remember stories told by parents, grandparents and great-aunts or uncles describing a vastly different city. Some stories are set in cold-water flats rented for a few dollars a month, others in marble mansions attended by armies of servants. A profound, almost mystical connection to the city gives these people a distinct perspective on its history and a powerful connection with its roots. They represent a living link with the city’s past.

This population typically knows a great deal about how and where their ancestors lived. They are voracious consumers of census records, regulars on Ancestry.com, prowlers of the city’s many cemeteries, retracers of long-ago journeys, takers of sentimental pilgrimages — to the park where the grandparents first met, the bridge where a grandfather proposed.

Natalie Diaz, whose mother was Camille Catenaccio, is one of these people. When she looks out the window of her faded red-brick building on Mulberry Street, she can see a neighborhood that has sheltered her family for a century.

A great-grandfather on her mother’s side, Alexander Tisi, arrived on Ellis Island from Naples as a baby around 1900, and his people settled in this district, their first address a 350-square-foot tenement apartment. In the building where Ms. Diaz lives, four generations of relatives have made their home. She grew up in the building, and her parents, sister and aunt and uncle live there today. The restaurant Il Piccolo Bufalo, on the ground floor, is one of three businesses her family runs in what she calls “the real Little Italy.”

Come September, when Ms. Diaz looks out the window of her second-floor apartment, a pair of conjoined railroad flats for which she pays under $2,000 a month, she will see the glittering garlands that herald the Feast of San Gennaro, an annual event that Alexander Tisi, with long-ago neighbors, helped start in 1927.

“This is my legacy,” said Ms. Diaz, who is 36, the mother of 8-year-old twins and founder of a business called Twiniversity, which serves parents of twins and triplets. “Everything I’ve ever known has been on Mulberry Street.”

Despite the midcentury exodus that sent many people to the suburbs, various factors have kept generations of New Yorkers rooted to the city — good schools, abundant hospitals, closeness to relatives and to churches and synagogues, secure and well-paying union jobs as teachers or civil servants, and especially the distinctive nature of the city’s housing stock.

“God bless rent control,” said Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council and a fourth-generation New Yorker whose maternal grandmother was born in 1918 on Hester Street on the Lower East Side. “That created a legacy in which apartments could be inherited by the next generation.”

Photo

At left in 1999, Mary Bartos's mother, Martha Bartos, in front of the store she founded in the ’50s. Right, Mary Bartos and her mother in the mid 1980s.Credit
The Bartos Family

New Yorkers in neighborhoods outside Manhattan also benefited from two-family houses that proved infinitely elastic as they were retrofitted over the years to accommodate everyone from grandparents to grown children. “And if you wanted to move to a more suburban area,” Mr. Bankoff said, “you could do that while staying in New York. You could move to a place like Forest Hills.”

Familiar roots in a city can make a person long to escape, but they can also act as geographical glue, imbuing a person with so many rich memories that leaving is unthinkable. So it has been forMary Bartos,68, a proud fourth-generation New Yorker who runs the Pan American Phoenix Shop on Lexington Avenue, which her mother, Martha Bartos, founded in the ‘50s.

Mary Bartos’s maternal grandmother, Edith Littenberg, was born on the Lower East Side in 1884and met her husband, Jacob Voice, at a neighborhood settlement house. Both had roots in Eastern Europe, and the grandmother, who cut an elegant figure, was known as the Duchess of Essex Street.

Mary’s mother was born in 1914, in New Jersey, but ended up in New York by the time she was in high school. Mary lived in a rent-controlled three-bedroom on East 85th Street for which the family paid $150 a month, though when the cost went up, they decamped to East 65th Street.

Ms. Bartos remembers a golden-hued Manhattan childhood — ice-skating in Central Park on Sunday mornings, celebrating birthday parties in the park, taking in the Saturday-morning cartoon show at the Trans-Lux 85th Street, playing a game called Off the Point — bouncing a ball from one side of the street to another on cross streets almost devoid of traffic.

These days she is happily ensconced in a one-bedroom penthouse in a white-brick co-op on East 78th Street that she bought in 1985 for $275,000. “New York can be a hard place to move to,” Ms. Bartos said. “But for me, it’s just very comfortable. I never contemplated not being a New Yorker. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Living on the footprint of ancestors can offer solace. But even if a neighborhood has been spiffed up and transformed seemingly for the better, the loss of once-gritty streets can feel like a betrayal. The disappearance of beloved institutions — the drugstore, the bookstore, even a deli that locals called the Ptomaine Stop — can feel like a series of slow-motion deaths, as it does for Arthur Nersesian, a playwright, poet and novelist who has lived for three decades on the Lower East Side.

Through his Irish-American mother, Honora Agnes Burke, Mr. Nersesian, 54, can trace his New York roots back five generations. Many of his forebears lived and worked near the one-bedroom on Fourth Street and First Avenue where he lives today.

Mr. Nerserian’s great-great-grandfather Richard Burke immigrated from Ireland around 1860 and lived in a tenement near Tompkins Square Park. His great-grandfather Thomas P. Burke, also a resident of the neighborhood, was a political operator and so vivid a figure in Mr. Nersesian’s mind that he can imagine him counting ballots on Pearl and Water Streets. His grandfather Patrick G. Burke was born in 1898 on Ninth Street and Avenue B.

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Daniel Soyer, right, a fifth-generation New Yorker, on his Brooklyn block. Left, Mr. Soyer in 1968 with the artist Moses Soyer, who was his grandfather. Top, Moses Soyer’s painting “Bethune Street on Sunday,” 1928.Credit
Top: All rights reserved, Estate of Moses Soyer/Licensed by VAGA, New York; right, Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times; left, Soyer Family

In 1983 Mr. Nersesian found his own berth in the neighborhood, a small rental facing an air shaft in a one-time tenement, for which he pays under $1,000 a month. “I was excited about moving to the East Village,” he said. “I was, what? — 22, 23, 24? You think you’ll never get old.”

For him the neighborhood is a palimpsest of memories, and he misses the edgier ones — the strip joints, the bonfires in the park. “Just after World War II,” he said, “my father paid $8 a week for a studio apartment on Mott Street in what’s now fashionable NoLIta. Streets I barely dared to walk down are now lined with restaurants I can’t afford.” He remembers streets so quiet you could hear footsteps in the night.

“It’s a formula for curmudgeonliness,” Mr. Nersesian, a rumpled figure with a mop of gray curls, said of his desire to recapture a long-evaporated past. “You become a teller of tales no one wants to hear.”

To ease his feelings of loss, he walks the city with a passion — a regular three-and-a-half-hour loop takes him across the Queensboro Bridge and back over the Williamsburg. New York is a character that runs through his work, including his 11th book, “Gladys of the Hunt,” to be published in January.

“This is my city,” he said. Still, he would depart the Lower East Side in a heartbeat if he could. “The neighborhood has outgrown me,” he said. “But I can’t afford to leave.”

For people whose family roots in the city run deep and whose forebears include artists, New York becomes a place of the imagination as well as a creation of stone and brick and steel. So it is for Daniel Soyer, 55, a grandson of the celebrated 20th-century painter Moses Soyer, whose twin was the artist Raphael Soyer.

Dr. Soyer is a professor of history at Fordham, where his specialties are American immigration and American Jewish history, and for him, the city exists on multiple levels. The brothers’ work, combined with his own knowledge of family history and history in general, “gives the city another dimension, a fourth dimension,” Dr. Soyer said. “I see it back through time as well as in space.”

On both sides of his family, he can trace a tangle of great-grandparents and even a great-great-grandparent who immigrated to New York a century or more ago. The Soyer brothers, who were born in Russia in 1899, immigrated with their family in 1912 and settled in the Bronx.

When Dr. Soyer was growing up in Sunnyside, Queens, his grandparents Moses and Ida, a former dancer, lived on West Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, in quarters appropriate for the successful bohemians they were. The apartment, which had interior French doors, appeared to have been carved out of a bigger apartment.

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Christian DeRuiter strolls along the Hudson, which runs through his family’s long history in the city, dating back to Dutch colonial days. Left, Johannah de Bloch and Frederick DeRuiter, Mr. DeRuiter’s paternal grandparents.Credit
From left, DeRuiter Family; Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“The building was a little run-down,” said Dr. Soyer, who visited his grandparents often. “But it was an exciting location. There was an old Italian doorman who was missing some fingers because he’d gotten them caught in the elevator gate. Apparently, that sort of thing was common in those days.”

The Soyer brothers produced countless images that captured the face of the metropolis — its streets, its subways, the Brooklyn Bridge. A work that resonates with many people is Raphael’s 1926 “Dancing Lesson.” “You can see the whole family,” Dr. Soyer said, “the parents, Abraham and Bella, sitting on the couch, Bella with a Yiddish newspaper; the grandmother sleeping on the couch; Israel, the brother of Moses and Raphael, playing the harmonica; the sister Rebbie teaching Moses how to dance.”

Dr. Soyer lives in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, in a century-old four-bedroom house whose décor includes a portrait of Louis Chassner, a tailor who was Moses’s father-in-law. He has always had a passionate interest in the world of his fathers. “It’s probably no accident that I’m not studying ancient Chinese history,” he said.

Even New Yorkers who can trace their roots back to the 19th or 18th centuries might seem like arrivistes to Christian DeRuiter. When Mr. DeRuiter stands at the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, he sees in his mind’s eye a small ship arriving in the 1620s or 1630s with the first Dutch families to the New World. Among those hardy newcomers was a young woman named Hannah de Flught.

Hannah was an ancestor on his father’s side of the family, “at least a dozen generations back and maybe more,” said Mr. DeRuiter, who is 42 and the pastoral events coordinator at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights.

Drawing from family stories handed down by an elderly aunt, combined with faded documents and entries in diaries in a trunk in the aunt’s New Jersey attic, Mr. DeRuiter has pieced together what he can about his long-ago ancestor.

Given his knowledge of the colony’s history, he suspects that she lived near the wharf. Although he has no clue as to her character or personality, given Dutch traditions of hospitality and entrepreneurship, especially on the part of women, he suspects that she might have run a boardinghouse and, like many of the new arrivals, been active in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Most of Hannah’s descendants probably fled the city when the English swept them out in the late 17th century, he said, though they stayed close to the Hudson River, settling in New Jersey or upstate New York. Mr. DeRuiter, however, has spent his life in New York. He grew up in New Dorp, Staten Island, and lives with his wife in a one-bedroom walk-up in Midwood, Brooklyn.

His direct link to one of the city’s earliest settlers has given him a powerful, even visceral sense of what their lives must have been like. “I’ve always had a passion for history,” Mr. DeRuiter said the other day, sitting in the cathedral’s baptistry beneath the colorful Peter Stuyvesant heraldry, which honors the colony’s last Dutch director general.

And he often contemplates the brutal voyage his young ancestor must have endured. “I can almost picture it,” he said. “What a scary prospect it must have been to arrive in the New World.”